Opera
theartsdesk
Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now.A suitcase bomb in Kiss Me DeadlyThe Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, which reopened its main theatre in October, having lost its ballet director Gennady Yanin to scandal and its stars Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev to the Mikhailovsky Ballet"Everyday"29205Noel GallagherPhyllida Lloyd1980 Read more ...
theartsdesk
Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year.As well as posting our usual range of reviews (coming up in the next couple of days, some terrific writing on theatre, film and television), we also have a selection of seasonal treats. On Christmas Day we are publishing a bumper arts quiz specifically tailored for readers of theartsdesk, who know their cultural onions. (Sample questions: "In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy what type of mint Read more ...
David Nice
A young chap from Elsewhere woos an alderman's daughter: not Dick Whittington in panto London, but Wagner's Walther von Stolzing in an unseasonal Nuremberg. No one is going to mind the solstitial disjunction - celebrating midsummer revels in the dead of winter - when this great saga of art and society is buoyed up by Antonio Pappano's lovingly prepared conducting, a good cast, lusty chorus and colourful costumes. Yet only folk determined on seasonal jollity to the exclusion of all else might not feel a certain want of the darker side to the human predicament which ought to pave the way to Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is unusual in art for collaborators to be of equal star-wattage. The pairing of Benjamin Britten and WH Auden was one such. Another, much longer-lasting, was Stravinsky and Balanchine, a partnership of equals that endured for nearly half a century. More recently, Antony Gormley has worked with both Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, to great effect. Can Turnage, McGregor and Wallinger replicate these? This has been the question.The answer is, unequivocally, yes. Wallinger took the lead, presenting a rich brew of possible starting points, which included the idea of the “window” created by Read more ...
David Nice
A disappointed man from Sheffield asked on a blog why Opera North was spoiling pampered London with two of its major productions and an offshoot this season when the rest of its vicinity was going operatically hungry. I can see his point, but we down here need to see what remarkable work this company can achieve (though we could always take a train to Leeds for the weekend, where there's plenty to see and do).It was, in any case, a rather timely reminder that while Deborah Warner's ENO Eugene Onegin, so lavishly presented, often failed to press the right human buttons, Neil Bartlett's Read more ...
David Nice
Who is more likely to be an operatic creature of flesh and blood: Puccini's young diva, unexpectedly caught up in the infernal machine of a lustful tyrant, or Tchaikovsky's teenager impetuously pouring out her soul in a love letter to a man she's just fallen for? Usually, you'd go for Tatyana over Tosca every time. At ENO it's currently the other way round. While Deborah Warner's new production of Eugene Onegin unfathomably misses most of the truths in a story we can all identify with, Catherine Malfitano's take on the best if most overdone Italian operatic thriller in the repertoire makes Read more ...
David Nice
Theatregoers may be disappointed to read on and discover I mean Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, the only 19th-century Shakespeare-based opera in the German language to hold the stage. Which it did, and not just in Germany, until the arrival of Verdi's infinitely superior Falstaff. Is this that rare thing, German comedy in music between Beethoven's Eighth Symphony and Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel that's actually funny? Not really; Wagner's Die Meistersinger stands alone. But it's a piece which offers plenty of roles for student singers - with two leading sopranos, no Read more ...
David Nice
What’s not to love about Tchaikovsky’s candid, lyric scenes drawn from Pushkin’s masterly verse novel? ENO’s advance publicity summed it up neatly by promising “lost love, tragedy, regret”. We’ve most of us been there. That does mean that truthfulness to life can count for even more in a performance than good singing. Both burned their way through Dmitri Tcherniakov’s radical Bolshoi rethink, but while there are four fine voices to help Deborah Warner’s surprisingly traditional production along, the truth flickers very faintly here.Warner updates the action, but by less than a century: Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I’m within 20 yards of Wexford Opera House when I stop a couple for directions, convinced that my map is some sort of Irish practical joke. Approached down a narrow and frankly rather unpromising side street, from the exterior Wexford Opera House does a very good impression of a row of terraced houses. Demure, unassuming, barely daring to obtrude into the domestic landscape of this small town, the only outward evidence of an internationally celebrated, 750-seat theatre are some fairy lights strung haphazardly across the road outside. Yet while the venue may be coy, there’s nothing shy about Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the year that G&S became definitively chic again? The slow-burn effect of ENO's "Miller Mikado" and Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy now results in numerous fringe benefits. Sasha Regan's all-male Union Theatre regime has delivered its best yet - Iolanthe at Wilton's Music Hall, the most touching and funny show I've seen over the last 11 months - and now Charles Court Opera gives us more witty operetta-in-close-up with a cast of nine backed up by two pianos. It's not quite on the level of Regan's imaginative refit, but it does place the singing and playing at the forefront, while the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.There was a “set” - a grey-walled shell and a pendulous shard-like mobile whose mere presence had one fearing the worst. And so the first Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Imagine what John Cleese might have done with the tale of a slutty sleepwalker who finds herself staying at a packed provincial guest house? Bellini doesn't even touch on farce, let alone psychological investigation. He instead follows the archetypal bel canto formula: dramatic thinness and vocal display. That La sonnambula doesn't even for one second pretend that it is anything other than a vehicle for showy pyrotechnics (something that was underlined in last night's overly literal Royal Opera House revival) means that one sits through the dramatic torpor with remarkable good Read more ...